Spam Registrations on Events Calendar

[hc2ca]

Just started receiving an obscene amount of spam via our community submission form; over 500 submissions in the last 24 hours. I’ve attempted to implement the captcha image per Casey’s script, however it shows a broken image. We’re already using captcha on our mail form, and it’s working there without any issues. Disabled plugins, reverted to 2011 theme, and still no joy. Any ideas why captcha wouldn’t be working on the community submission form?

[hc2ca]

Would it matter what folder I put Casey’s script into? I made a folder in the main plugin directory, and called it: the-events-calendar-community-captcha

[George]

Hey Harold!

Sorry to hear about all your spam! I’m curious, what’s the exact script for captchas that you’re referring to? If there’s something outdated about it, we can update that tutorial or FAQ to make sure this problem doesn’t persist.

In the meantime, there’s some good news! We’ve been working hard on getting full-on ReCAPTCHA support into our next release. We’re on track to pull that off, so if you can hang on until then, we’ll have an even better solution ready for you to use.

I hope that answers your main questions for now, let me know more information about your existing script and we might be able to offer more insight from there.

Cheers!

George

[hc2ca]

I believe it is this one: https://github.com/caseypatrickdriscoll/patched_up_community_events_captcha

[George]

Hey Harold,

Cool, that script is pretty well-written. One thing I’m curious about here is caching: you mentioned that you’d disabled all the plugins on your site, but is there any chance you left your caching plugin active? Or deactivated it, but the cache didn’t clear in the time it took for you to investigate your issue here?

I only ask because when I went to your site, many of your assets are being cached and/or minified. I’d recommend ensuring that both caching and minification are disabled on your site, and that any caches from your end are cleared.

If you do this, update the ticket here so we can check out your event submission form again and see if anything’s different. If not, then we can rule out caching and minification as possible culprits and go from there.

Thanks!
George

[hc2ca]

We use W3 Total Cache, which requires a manual cache purge daily, as well as anytime we activate/deactivate a new plugin. We’d deactivated all of the plugins on the site, including this one. Just prior to that, we did in fact clear the cache. Still no dice.

Per your advice, I’ve gone in once more and cleared the cache, deactivated this plugin and still no CAPTCHA characters are visible.

[hc2ca]

This reply is private.

[George]

Hey Harold,

I tried out Contact Form 7 on a little local test site, and right “out of the box” that script that you linked to worked fine for me in – captchas were generated in both the Contact Form 7 email form, and also in the Community Events event submission form.

It’s still possible that your caching setup is messing with the Captcha generation here (or something about your server configuration, possibly).

In my opinion, the best solution would be to hold off and just manually delete the spam entries for now, until the next update comes out. Built-in captcha support is one of the key new features in the coming update, pretty good timing! Waiting for that release seems to be the efficient course of action here, instead of trying to patch together a solution now – only to get the next Events Calendar update and use the new built-in Captcha anyways.

Do you think you can hold the fort until the next update? The built-in Captcha solution should work really nicely, and will allow you to trim your Plugins repository by being able to get rid of that custom script from GitHub.

[hc2ca]

Thanks for checking on this. Do you know when the new version is scheduled for release?

[George]

Hey Harold,

Apologies for the delayed response – but yes, the new version is scheduled for release sometime in mid-December. It could, of course, get pushed back a bit for any number of reasons, but it’s very reasonable to expect its release by the New Year.

How tolerable is that (estimated) timeline for you? Also, I’m curious: is Akismet installed on your site?

Thanks,
George

[George]

Hey Harold,

Just wanted to check in on this issue and see if you had any news here. It’s been a few days since this issue was last updated, but we did have a weekend in the meantime, so no worries or anything  – we’ll keep our eye on this ticket, I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,
George

[George]

Hey Harold,

Since this issue has been open for a while, I’m going to close it up for now – if you have other issues, don’t hesitate to come back and open a new ticket though! If you want to open another ticket related to the problems in this ticket, that’s certainly fine too – include a link to this ticket for context, and we’ll get back to trying to help you out.

Cheers!
George

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